


love will burn the doubts

by elisela



Series: the trees of vermont [7]
Category: 9-1-1 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst with a Happy Ending, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mentions of Suicide, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Soft Eddie Diaz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-16
Updated: 2020-07-16
Packaged: 2021-03-04 21:01:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25302754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elisela/pseuds/elisela
Summary: Buck pokes at his food, moves more around his plate than he eats, finally sets it on the coffee table with hardly a dent taken out. Eddie watches him, tries to remember breakfast, the eggs he’d scooped out onto their plates, the toast he’d handed to Chris with a smile. He thinks about dinner the night before and the way Buck had gotten distracted by a song on the radio and had carried his half-full plate to the sink when it was over and dropped it in, and lunch before that when he told Eddie not to pick something up from Bobby because he’d already eaten.It’s been snowing all week.Eddie thinks he should have been more aware of the signs by now.
Relationships: Evan "Buck" Buckley/Eddie Diaz (9-1-1 TV)
Series: the trees of vermont [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1790356
Comments: 14
Kudos: 206





	love will burn the doubts

**Author's Note:**

  * For [hideeho](https://archiveofourown.org/users/hideeho/gifts).



> For Dea, who asked for domestic, post-injury cuddling ... this is not really that so clearly I owe you something else. I'm sorry, ily!
> 
> This is immediately post [at the right pitch](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25227823)\--read that first or this will make no sense.
> 
> "Mentions of suicide" tag is just to be safe, and is not something either Buck or Eddie thinks of doing. Message me on [tumblr](http://hearteyesforbuck.tumblr.com/) if you want more details before you read it.

Buck is tapping at the wall.

The room is still dark in the late Vermont winter; Eddie squints at the alarm clock before he groans and sits up on his elbows, shivers when the blankets fall and the cold air settles on his skin. “Buck.”

Buck doesn’t sleep well since the avalanche. He hides it, hid it better when they were sleeping in separate rooms, but Eddie knows what the dark circles under his eyes mean, knows the feel of his careful stillness in bed from the way he sinks into the mattress, knows the difference between the measured breaths he takes and the soft huff of sleep on his lips.

“Buck,” he says again. “I’m cold.”

Buck looks at him, crosses the room and comes to a stop beside the bed. His gait is uneven since the walking boot came off, the ache made worse by the constant cold, but he’s never complained.

Eddie wishes he would.

“You’re always cold,” Buck says, bracing his hands on the mattress and leaning down. Eddie feels lips brush his check, and Buck pulls away. “Go back to sleep. I’m just going to go get some water.”

He doesn’t come back. Eddie stares at the ceiling until light breaks on the horizon.

“Chris says he needs to go into town,” is the first thing Buck says when Eddie steps into the kitchen and Eddie stops, furrows his brow. “He’s been watching Little House on the Prairie reruns again.”

“Did he say what he needed?”

Buck huffs a laugh and shakes his head. “No, he’s not talking to me. I told him he didn’t need to be watching television before the sun was up and you should have seen the look he gave me.”

He sighs, reaches for the coffee pot only to have Buck nudge his hip and point to a mug on the counter. “I’ll talk to him,” he says, reaching for it, letting the warmth seep into his hands. “I’m gonna go build a fire, let’s eat breakfast in the living room.” He takes a drink, sets the mug down behind him on the island and moves behind Buck, wraps his arms around Buck’s stomach and sighs against him, resting his forehead against Buck’s shoulder.

Buck keeps his eyes on the window; he doesn’t move.

It’s snowing when he and Chris leave the supermarket, cart loaded down with everything on Buck’s list, a few extra bags of snacks and things Eddie is confident with preparing (soup, for the most part, sealed into plastic containers at the deli). Chris has new watercolors in the truck and sketchbook tucked under his arm, pencil behind his ear, a messy, eight-year old imitation of Buck, pouring over a sketch of a house he had worked on in the car. 

“I don’t think my porch is right,” he says, and Eddie hums. 

“You’ll have to check with Buck,” he responds. “After you apologize to him.”

“You said it nine times already,” Chris mutters. 

“Do you need ten?”

Chris sighs, and Eddie starts loading up the car. 

He doesn’t worry about Buck’s absence until they’ve been home for an hour. His truck is in the driveway, snow accumulating on top of the hood, there’s something in the slow cooker that’s making Eddie’s mouth water, but his boyfriend is nowhere. 

Later, after the groceries are unloaded and he’s got a fire going in the living room, he jogs up the stairs to change—if he’s going to be miserably cold, he’s going to do it in sweats, not jeans that are damp at the hem. There’s a University of Vermont sweatshirt on the bed that smells like Buck, and he pulls it on, breathes in the faint cedar scent shamelessly, and is halfway back downstairs before he registers that something isn’t right. 

It’s always a little colder upstairs; Buck blames the single-paned windows, swears he’ll replace them come summer—but this is biting, a cold that seeps into his bones, steals his breath. 

The attic door is ajar—barely an inch, not enough that he would have ever noticed from the end of the hall. They never go in the attic. It’s unfinished, more of a storage area for material possessions Eddie has never had the chance to gather than a usable space. He can list the contents by heart—two storage containers full of Chris’ school and art work, a gun safe with two rifles that had belonged to his grandfather. 

Buck has no reason to be in the attic.

The sight of the open window at the far end of the attic sends his heart into overdrive, stutters out a frantic rhythm against his chest. It’s not a far drop to the roof of Chris’ room, an addition to the house that must have been a sunroom originally, but there’s a pit of dread building in his stomach, he’s on edge. 

Buck’s not on the roof, but the snow has been cleared away, just a dusting of the falling snow remaining. Eddie can follow traces of footprints around the outside edge, stopping near the thin metal ladder attached to the side of the house—for chimney cleaners, the realtor had told Eddie. 

He’s sitting on the window ledge before he remembers that Chris is in the house, the roof is slick with ice; a bad idea waiting to happen.

Hen, Karen, Bobby, Athena—they’re all just a phone call away. All Eddie has to do is ask for help. 

Buck is sitting with his legs hanging off the side of the roof, and Eddie feels his heart drop. 

“I’m fine,” Buck mutters. “I just went up to check the roof, Eddie, you’re acting like I was going to jump.”

 _I thought you were_ , he thinks. “How long were you out there?”

Buck shrugs; Eddie steadies his hips as he lowers himself into the warm water. A breath hisses between his teeth, and—he’s tense, Eddie realizes, and that’s all he needs to strip, sheds his clothes and kicks them into the corner of the bathroom before he climbs in behind Buck. 

“I’m fine,” Buck says again, his voice hoarse. 

“I don’t think you are,” Eddie says. He tries to keep his voice gentle, even, doesn’t let it shake with the fear that’s been flooding through him for the last ten minutes. “You could have—“

Buck’s rigid, holding his body still, hunched over, and Eddie pulls him back, presses warm hands against his cold skin, kisses into his hair, down the back of his neck and over his broad shoulders. “Tell me,” he pleads, a whisper in the silence of the bathroom. 

The minutes tick by; Eddie cups water in his hands and pours it over Buck’s shoulders until the bright red of his skin fades into a rosy pink, until the goosebumps flatten on his skin, until the tension bleeds from his body and he sinks back onto Eddie’s chest. “The snow,” he says. Eddie brings a hand up to his hair, tries to give him some comfort. “I thought—it’s heavy, it could bury Chris, I had to make sure—”

He stops, but Eddie knows. The roof he’d repaired in the last of summer, the weight of the snow, the placement of Christopher’s bed.

“I saw it,” Buck whispers. “I can’t stop seeing it.”

Chris stays with Karen; Eddie is reluctant to leave the house, doesn’t want to let Buck from his sight, but Karen offers a sleepover despite it being a school night and Eddie accepts. She comes to the front door to exchange a pan of lasagne for Chris’ backpack, looks at Eddie hard before she leaves. 

“Hen’s up all night,” she says. “She’s on call at the hospital, but if you two need anything—”

Buck pokes at his food, moves more around his plate than he eats, finally sets it on the coffee table with hardly a dent taken out. Eddie watches him, tries to remember breakfast, the eggs he’d scooped out onto their plates, the toast he’d handed to Chris with a smile. He thinks about dinner the night before and the way Buck had gotten distracted by a song on the radio and had carried his half-full plate to the sink when it was over and dropped it in, and lunch before that when he told Eddie not to pick something up from Bobby because he’d already eaten.

It’s been snowing all week.

Eddie thinks he should have been more aware of the signs by now.

There’s a book buried under a pile of papers on Buck’s desk. It’s not the battered copies of the wild west novels he likes to make fun of, not the dog-eared copies of bodice rippers he borrows from Eleanor and reads outloud to Eddie in bed, snorting in between passages before Eddie takes it out of his hands and throws it across the room. It’s pristine white, a bookmark slid neatly a quarter of the way through, spine unbroken. The cover is stark; a mountain with snow rushing down, trees being crushed in its wake. 

Eddie carries it to bed, sits with his back against the headboard and watches as Buck flushes.

“I just need to know more about it,” he says quietly, looking down. “If there was something different I should have done—”

“You did everything right,” Eddie says. 

Buck’s eyes glimmer with tears; the comforter is fisted in his hands.

He moves the bookmark and sets the book on his nightstand, settles his hand in Buck’s hair, runs it down to his back. Buck’s head is pillowed against his thigh, arm slung around Eddie’s waist, breathing too deep to be asleep. 

“Buck,” he says, “we can talk about it, it might help.” Eddie had looked at therapy, at medication, at giving in to his parent’s demands and drinking himself into oblivion, rejected all of those and written a book. 

When Buck laughs, it sounds more like a sob.

“Tell me,” he says. “Sweetheart, tell me.”

“Turn off the light,” is Buck’s muffled command, so Eddie does; leans over and flips it off, buries himself under the covers and pulls Buck against him, slides his hands under Buck’s shirt to feel his skin. “I keep seeing him,” Buck says. “Not on the mountain, I see—” he stops.

“It’s okay,” Eddie says. He kisses Buck’s cheek, his forehead, his birthmark; everywhere he can reach. 

“You’re just going to make it your fault,” Buck says. His words are rough, strained. “I can’t do this. Goodnight, Eddie.”

It takes Eddie hours to fall asleep. 

Eddie had spent: an hour on a mountain searching for his son, four hours at a hospital waiting to be allowed in Buck’s room, five weeks feeling guilty for completely forgetting about Buck, an entire night struggling with the slow realization that Buck wasn’t processing his trauma because he didn’t want Eddie putting it on himself.

He wakes up to the sound of a sledgehammer.

Buck’s shirtless; swinging at the wall like it personally offended him.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Eddie asks. He walks over, grabs onto it when Buck pulls back again.

“Writing a book,” Buck says. “Let go.”

Buck comes downstairs an hour later, covered in dust; still shirtless, pieces of drywall clinging to his flannel pajama pants. He takes the coffee Eddie offers him, leans against the counter. 

“You were right,” Eddie says. He moves to stand next to him, looks out the window at the snow in the backyard, wonders what Buck sees. “I was—overwhelmed. But I shouldn’t have put that on you.”

Buck hums. “I love you,” he says after a moment. His arm slips around Eddie’s shoulder; Eddie leans his head back against it. “But I don’t want to talk about it.”

It’s a feeling Eddie knows well. “How’s your book? Are we going to be able to sleep up there tonight?”

“There’s a fireplace up there,” Buck says, and Eddie knows they’ll be in the guest room for the next few days. “Did you know that?”

Eddie raises his eyebrow. “Did you know that before you started tearing the wall down?”

Buck doesn’t talk to him about it.

But he works, hauls in stones from the home improvement store, recruits Chris to help him place them, and he eats, shoveling pasta in his mouth after working for a few hours, little jobs around town and on the fireplace at night, and—

And he _sleeps_ , most nights, tucks himself against Eddie in the smaller guest room bed, presses a hand against Eddie’s heart and allows Eddie to pull him close. 

Eddie can live without talking about it.

It’s what he does best.

“Your book is certainly more useful than mine,” Eddie says, tilts his head back when Buck stands behind him and rests his chin on Eddie’s shoulder. “In fact, I probably have a few extra copies we could throw in there as kindling.”

Buck snorts in his ear. “I build you a fireplace and you threaten to burn my favorite book?”

“I’ll write you another one,” he says. It’s a promise; he hopes Buck hears it that way.


End file.
